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(where "niche audience" includes speakers of the most spoken language in the world, but I assume you're talking about the West specifically)
by Manishearth 10y ago
(where "niche audience" includes speakers of the most spoken language in the world, but I assume you're talking about the West specifically)
- Freak_NL 10y agoI was under the assumption that for the average Chinese speaker the Basic Multilingual Plane sufficed. Chinese characters (as used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) were certainly added beyond the BMP as well (the CJK Unified Ideographps Extensions), but to my knowledge these all tend to be rather rare (think characters from Buddhist sutras, linguistic research, historical use, et cetera, but also from names not yet provided for in the BMP).
- Manishearth 10y agoHuh. IIRC they're a bit more common than that, but yes, not very common. Or perhaps you're just talking about Chinese where I'm also considering Kanji and others. Which isn't from the most spoken language in the world, but still, top 10!
- Freak_NL 10y agoActually for Japanese in particular the extended CJK ranges are of limited use (I'm more familiar with Japanese than Chinese), although they do contain the parts of JIS X 0213 that were still missing from Unicode (all of them rare characters) and some ideographical component parts that are useful for dictionary and educational software. With the latter you can for example use Unicode codepoints for the distinct components of a single Chinese character (e.g., 𠂉 as the top-right part of 族). That is a fairly specialised use though. For Korean and Vietnamese the extra Chinese characters might apply to ancient names (geographical usually I would wager), but neither language has a lot of ideographs in modern usage. It's certainly an interesting topic though.